“Latin” and “Slavonic” Education in the Primary Classes of Russian Seminaries in the 18th Century

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of using the Latin and “Slavensky” (that is, the combined Russian and Church Slavonic) languages in primary ecclesiastical education in the 18th century. By the 1740s, seminary education in Latin had established itself in Russia. But primary teaching of reading and writing in Russian and Church Slavonic was the tradition until the end of the 18th century, regardless of where the teaching was taking place, either at home or at a Russian school affiliated with a seminary. Russian schools were organized for teaching illiterate or semiliterate children. But by the late 18th century, several seminaries attempted to reorganize “Russian schools” into ecclesiastical schools in which Russian would be the only language of instruction. Junior classes at seminaries were fully focused on teaching Latin, but Latin was by no means a complete replacement for Russian. The principal method of instruction was translation, and the administrators of many seminaries demanded attention to the quality of the students’ translations into Russian. Thus, Russian and Latin were functionally distributed in primary education. Only Church Slavonic was practically excluded from teaching after the primary courses of reading and church singing, and that preconditioned its conservation as a language used only for church services, leading to the extinction of the hybrid form.